Investigating Rhetorical Aspects of Writing Argumentative Essays and Persuasive Posters: Students’ Perspective

Students at the tertiary level need arguments because they are expected to use analytical and critical thinking skills. The present study is situated in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context in an Omani University and reports the experience of (N=46) undergraduate EFL writers in argumentative essays and persuasive posters. Using rhetorical strategies, and drawing on the principles of persuasive writing, the participants prepared posters and essays on two separate topics. Data were collected from the 46 participants’ responses to a semi-structured online survey questionnaire. Analysis of the data obtained indicates that the participants preferred designing posters to writing persuasive essays while reporting varieties of rhetorical difficulties in building an argument for persuasion. The participants also perceived establishing evidence and facts as the most challenging element in persuasive writing and arousing the audience’s feelings and emotions as the most challenging rhetorical appeal in posters. Some pedagogical implications were reported as well.

Metadiscourse as a Way of Achieving Persuasion in Literary Criticism Texts

This study aims at examining the use of metadiscourse markers in literary criticism texts to identify the role of the reader and how these markers are used to produce more persuasive essays. The data of 72,727 words from 17 texts were written by three well-known authors, namely, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Stanley Fish. Hyland’s (2005) model of interpersonal metadiscourse markers was used to analyze the data. The analysis revealed that metadiscourse markers are used by literary critics to create coherent and persuasive texts. It was found out that the theory of criticism adopted by the literary critics does not affect the use of metadiscourse markers only maybe in terms of relying more on logos, ethos or pathos. The results of this study comply with those of previous research showing that metadiscourse markers are frequently used in literary criticism texts. This study will contribute to both the literary genre and the genre of critical essays by identifying the linguistic features to be used to produce more effective and convincing literary criticism texts. It will also help future critics to write more persuasive texts by highlighting the means that enable them to influence their readers and to produce more coherent and convincing texts. Keywords metadiscourse; persuasion; literary criticism; essays; critical theory

An Investigation into the Difficulties of Using Transitional Words in Kurdish EFL Students’ Writing at the University Level

The aim of this research is to deal with the use of different kinds of transitional words in Kurdish EFL students’ writing in two different levels. Namely, Kurdish EFL second- and third-year students often encounter problems of using transitional words when they want to write any kinds of paragraphs, essays in academic writing lectures. They have particularly made various kinds of mistakes while writing argumentative or persuasive essays. This study comprises of theoretical background and data analysis for samples of writing. It also proposes possible pedagogical implications and recommendations which cover doable teaching strategies for improving writing practice and academic writing. The result shows that second year students have inadequate ability and skills to use different kinds of transitional words. On the other hand, third year students have more abilities, but they have often misrepresented or clichéd most of the types of transitional words.

Investigating the Persuasive Writing Performance of Moroccan Advanced EFL Students: Is it a problem of “Language” or ‘Reasoning” Acquisition Device?

This study investigates the extent to which the results of rhetorical comparisons of persuasive essays by US English native speakers and others by Moroccan advanced EFL students will provide empirical evidence for Kaplan‘s (1966) contrastive rhetoric hypothesis. This is especially regarding the fact that EFL students-writing problems are a byproduct of the negative transfer of rhetorical strategies from their first language (L1). This hypothesis is tested by comparing 20 EFL and Arabic L1 persuasive essays by the same EFL students to essays in English as L1 by native speakers to identify the extent to which the language of composing and one’s cultural background affects the writing quality of their essays. The study hypothesizes that if Kaplan’s contrastive rhetoric claims were accurate, then Moroccan advanced EFL writers would produce essays that tend to be rhetorically less accurate when judged by standard English rhetorical criteria. Moreno’s (2005) approach to match comparable corpora of persuasive essays from two different cultural and linguistic backgrounds was adopted. As for the study participants, 40 advanced student-writers from two discrepant language and cultural backgrounds were recruited to take part in the study. While the results of a stepwise multiple regression analysis provides further evidence corroborating the validity of the rhetorical measures used in the study, group mean scores comparisons and a Multiple Discriminant analysis of the data indicates that those writers from various cultural backgrounds seem to face far more similar than different rhetorical problems and their writing inadequacies are equally distributed regardless of which language the study participants used to write their essays.

The Use of Metadiscourse Markers in Malaysian Undergraduate Persuasive Essay Corpus at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan

Metadiscourse in undergraduate essay writing is the linguistic expressions used by student writers to organise written texts while interacting with their imaginary readers. This paper presents a preliminary study to discover and present the use of metadiscourse markers in persuasive essays written by a group of undergraduate students from a chosen public university in Malaysia, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan. For the purpose of this study, a simplified metadiscourse framework for ESL lay writers proposed by Tan et al. (2012) is used. The metadiscourse markers in a corpus of undergraduate persuasive essays were explored with the assistance of a concordance software, WordSmith Tools. The findings reveal the frequency of the metadiscourse markers in the corpus and how they are commonly utilised in sentences. This study is expected to pave the way for more studies related to metadiscourse in undergraduate essays from other universities across this country.

Analysing ESL Persuasive Essay Writing Using Toulmin’s Model of Argument

In Malaysian universities, writing in English is taught in several settings: writing for general purposes, writing for academic purposes and writing for specific purposes. Writing in these settings allows learners to learn to write in different genres, such as research, reports, and persuasive writing genres. One of the standard genres is persuasive because it is used to convince readers of what is researched or reported. To be competent in persuading or arguing, using the appropriate rhetorical and linguistic structure is crucial. The appropriate rhetorical and linguistic elements will help to achieve the writers' objective and intention. This paper will examine rhetorical and linguistic structures used by the ESL writers in producing a persuasive essay. Fifteen persuasive essays written by tertiary learners were analysed in this study. The researchers employed Stephen Toulmin's Model of argument (1969) as the tool of analysis in identifying the rhetorical and linguistic structures realised in the students' essays. The analysis outcome indicates that the 15 ESL writers under investigation comply with Toulmin's model except for the rebuttal stage, which was not visible in the essays. The findings will explain the common and uncommon rhetorical and linguistic elements used based on the model that Toulmin has developed. The implications from the findings are twofold; first, academic writing teachers can focus on the necessary elements to produce competent persuasive ESL writers, and secondly, textbook developers may produce their books based on the findings drawn from this study.

Argument annotation and analysis using deep learning with attention mechanism in Bahasa Indonesia

Argumentation mining is a research field which focuses on sentences in type of argumentation. Argumentative sentences are often used in daily communication and have important role in each decision or conclusion making process. The research objective is to do observation in deep learning utilization combined with attention mechanism for argument annotation and analysis. Argument annotation is argument component classification from certain discourse to several classes. Classes include major claim, claim, premise and non-argumentative. Argument analysis points to argumentation characteristics and validity which are arranged into one topic. One of the analysis is about how to assess whether an established argument is categorized as sufficient or not. Dataset used for argument annotation and analysis is 402 persuasive essays. This data is translated into Bahasa Indonesia (mother tongue of Indonesia) to give overview about how it works with specific language other than English. Several deep learning models such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), and GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) are utilized for argument annotation and analysis while HAN (Hierarchical Attention Network) is utilized only for argument analysis. Attention mechanism is combined with the model as weighted access setter for a better performance. From the whole experiments, combination of deep learning and attention mechanism for argument annotation and analysis arrives in a better result compared with previous research.